In addition to any basketball developments that may take place in recruiting and with the new staff, the next couple of weeks will see SFN spend a lot more time focusing on football.
We’ll be developing a lot of our own entries, but we will never hesitate to direct you to spend time at other sites/blogs your time will be well spent there. With that in mind, this entry definitely deserves some of your time.
The guy from MGOBLOG has put together an awesome look at reviewing the performance of college football players compared to their recruiting rankings as leaving high school. He uses a subjective five point scale to create rankings and generates somevery interesting work. (You have to wonder why bloggers are the ones that come up with this kind of creative work as opposed to Rivals or Insiders or other resources?)
While Feldman’s piece (SFN – a recent piece on ESPN.com) clearly illuminates the downside of college football recruiting, there is a case to be made for the enteprise other than “yay money.” Do recruiting rankings matter? I tend to think yes, but it’s fairly common to see people declare rankings to be useless (Braylon Edwards, AJ Hawk) or outstanding based on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes substituting for actual numbers is a major pet peeve of mine, especially when it’s something fairly easy to compile and track. Enclosed herein is an attempt to rate the Rivals ratings.
I find this kind of retrospective very interesting from an NC State perspective in light of the Wolfpack’s great showing in the 2006 NFL Draft. (Link)
Many national pundits took the opportunity to criticize Chuck Amato’s coaching staff for failing to win more games last year with all of the “talent” that was drafted from the Wolfpack’s defense. But, the pundits failed to note that two of State’s three first round draft choices (John McCargo and Manny Lawson) were both rated as just 1-star recruits in high school and garnered little recruiting interest from the big named college football programs. Sometimes I think that ONLY NC State could get “criticized” for taking unknown high school players and developing them into first round draft picks (one leaving school a year early!!)
You will need to go to the MGO’s blog to see the set up and the analysis, but you should probably click here and read The Mess That is Tom Lemming to understand some of the set up:
The Feldman piece (on ESPN) linked previously is a recap of the ’02 Army All-American game and provides hilarious insight into the deeply twisted mind of Tom Lemming, who put college fooball legends Jake Carney, Marcus Freeman, and Scott Raridon — Irish recruits all — in the game. There were no fewer than twelve Irish recruits in the game, including three tight ends! Of course, Notre Dame’s legendary 2002 recruiting class would proceed to extend Notre Dame’s streak without a bowl win to 58 years and leave their indelible mark on us all.
Recent Related:
Don’t hesitate to take a look around at some of our recent football links and leave us some good comments:
